General UI adjustments and QOL changes.

[[DE]Grzegorz]

The introduction of diegetic UI ~2 years ago was... polarising, many people swore by the old ways and they had valid reasons for that, it was pretty obvious that at least some usability of the UI was sacrificed for cross-platform compatibility, aesthetics or both. We've came a long way since then and the UI was improved in many ways to accommodate for various input devices or simple ease of use or quality of life features but there still is a long way ahead before the UI can reach its ultimate form. Here, I propose a few changes that should get us a few steps closer to that.

There's a plenty of screen real estate that's simply wasted or badly utilized, other solutions would achieve the same while being more space-efficient.
The biggest offender? Whole Inventory UI which is limited to 2 rows, ever increasing amount of columns and scrolls sideways That was one of a few changes I personally hated and I think I'm not alone.

 

 

But how can we improve that? I propose this set of changes:

The UI will now more classically expand vertically which is inarguably the more natural and common way, we are exposed to it everywhere computers are present, you scroll vertically on your phone, on your PC, the scroll on your mouse is vertically, there's no reason for the scroll to be horizontally on PC.

Solution mockup.

 

But the more keen-eyed of you might notice an issue, what happens to items we want to sell, where will they go? Fear not, it's all accounted for.

Colour coding.

 

Items you want to sell will simply be colourcoded instead of forcefully ripped from where they were, leaving a nasty blank space and being moved somewhere else. This will allow for way more items to be displayed at once while retaining the usability of seeing what's going to be lost forever at a glance.

afterthought quality of life: Mark items as trash so you can visit Baro's kiosk and sell all of the unwanted parts without having to go through and select all of them one by one. This whole set of changes might as well be applied there.

Component sorting.
It's no secret that the inventory of a player that has spent any time acquiring resources and parts can be a complete mess and be quite disorienting as well as making it hard to keep track of what's missing. I've got an idea for that as well.

 

As long as you have at least a single piece of the puzzle a component-built item is, the UI will accommodate for that, displaying the whole component list as well as highlighting which parts are missing. Same could be applied to the foundry. So long you have at least a single piece, the list of all remaining components will remain visible.

The current accuracy manifest is pretty well done and I have not much to say about it, it could be expanded to utilize the screenspace more fully however.

 

DISCLAIMER
I cannot guarantee that these changes are fully compatible with the input devices generally used on consoles.
To be frank, at this point we might be better off having separate UI for PC and console instead of one cross-compatible UI that doesn't get either one completely right.

Edited September 12, 2017 by Mofixil